Summer’s here

This week was pretty busy. I started my internship at Centaur, and we bought another car so I can get there.

I started on Thursday. Centaur is a small company (around 100 employees) that designs power-efficient x86 processors for mobile and embedded stuff. I’ll be trying to improve their verification abilities and learn a thing or two about hardware. I’m excited about the work. And perhaps it’s only a classic case of “grad student meets cushy corporate job,” but I’m also pretty impressed with the company.

Let me start with the break room, since it is the most delicious aspect of working there. They supply breakfast (donuts and bagels), lunch (brought in from a different restaurant every day, with an online ordering system where you choose what you want that morning), dinner (from another restaurant, if you stay that late and ask for it), coffee (starbucks packages like you’d buy at the store and brew at home, and lots of mix-ins), sodas (an entire fridge full of various 12-packs), sugar (a grocery-store like wall of candy bars, power bars, etc.), and fruit (apples, oranges, bananas). I’ve been warned the average weight-gain for the first year is 15 lbs. I suspect this is merely anecdotal, but trying to eat well seems quite necessary.

Upon realizing you have failed to eat well, you can head down to the weight room and running trail. And there are some very unusual and excessive perks, like “pull your car out back if you want your oil changed today”, and “sign up here if you a haircut today.” To cap it all off, they are about a 10-15 minute drive on mostly neighborhood roads which are immune to rush-hour delays.

When I first moved to Austin, my bedroom was empty except for a mattress on the floor. The living room had a card-table with my computers on it, a chair, and a couch. And all the walls were bare. My office is kind of like that, except it’s smaller and doesn’t have a couch and mattress. Actually it also had a trash can on Thursday, but even that was gone today. I suspect whoever took it figured uninhabited offices don’t need trash cans. Clearly I need to bring some kind of stuff in with me on Monday. The office also has a full-wall whiteboard. Alas, my request to install a chalkboard instead was dismissed without, I thought, proper consideration.

Getting a car took some time. I can now reliably identify foreign scammers on Craigslist by looking at the post’s title alone. But this isn’t saying much — their schemes are so obvious and poorly executed that it’s a wonder anyone could be duped. At any rate, we got a 2000 Corolla with about 90k miles on Wednesday night, just in time for me to drive it to work on Thursday.

On Thursday night — and this was Laura’s first trip in the car — we were going to go out to dinner, and right after we got onto the interstate one of the tires suddenly went completely flat. Luckily we discovered a donut, jack, etc., in the trunk and were thus able to change it out, hollering to communicate as cars trucks whizzed by. I didn’t see any obvious nail or anything in the tire so I’m hoping that it’s just an awful fluke and not some sign of any kind of deeper problem.

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